An embodiment of the invention is directed to automated processes for distributing online content that may be used for influencing the behavior of recipients. Other embodiments are also described and claimed.
Online content provision including online advertising and marketing has grown steadily since the inception of the Internet and the growth of publicly available online services. Users can access a wide variety of information that meets their interests, by for example accessing Web sites that are generated by content providers. A computer equipped with a client program called a “browser” makes it a relatively simple task to traverse the vast network of information available on the Internet and in particular through the protocol known as the “World Wide Web”. In addition to Web sites however, other types of online content delivery techniques have flourished, including electronic mail (email) and online chat (e.g., Instant Messaging). Software protocols have been developed that allow relatively rich content to be included in addition to plain text, such as graphics, audio and video.
An individual user's interactions with a particular merchant's Web server may be tracked. For example, visits, sales, buying trends, product/service preferences, as well as identifying information such as the user's home or office location geographically speaking may be discovered. Based on this information, a service provider may then present or offer its customers certain products and services that are believed to most likely to be purchased on an individual basis. To gain new or retain existing customers, a provider may need to ensure that it presents products and services that the consumer is interested in and is likely to sign up for or purchase. Accordingly, the importance of targeted advertising and content provision is becoming an important role in the way providers conduct business over the Internet.
Recently, more sophisticated techniques for online marketing have been developed to help better promote the products and services of merchants who have online presence. For example, email marketing has proven to be an efficient and effective way to engage a merchant's existing customers, as well as attract potential consumers. Email messages (as part of what is referred to as an email “campaign”) may be sent automatically to a list of addressees including existing customers, where these email messages may originate from an Internet domain of the merchant and contain some form of targeted advertising. There are also products that are available to help increase a merchant's list of opt-in recipients, improve the percentage of the outgoing email messages that are actually opened by the recipient, customize the format, content, and subject line of the email so the recipient will be more eager to do business with the merchant, and measure the results of this email campaign to determine whether the money has been well spent. Such marketing tools become even more important when considering that consumers generally eye online marketing that is in the form of unsolicited email or spam suspiciously.
Conventional implementations of target content provisions for Web sites are also associated with the disadvantage of time consumption. The conventional techniques for adjusting Web site and email campaign renderings is a time consuming process which incorporates continuous human intervention and an extreme amount of information. To evaluate the success of content presented on Web sites, the providers of the site generally collect user response data similar to that described above. That is, user information such as cookies, and general content information is monitored and collected. A database is created of this collected information, which includes massive amounts of data. The information is later analyzed either by an analytical engine, or through user intervention, and resultant data is created expressing the likelihood of successful content for various profiles of target users. Decisions are made on the type of content that should be provided, and the content is manually adjusted by a human. This includes changing a Web site's presentation, or the content provided by the site, for example, or offering a discount on a type of product or service for sale. This process, however, may require highly skilled programmers operating a database with a complicated database query language, and can take days, weeks or sometimes months to update an email or Web site campaign, depending upon the resources available to a provider.